Marco Rubio wants to be lead sponsor on anti-abortion bill

Sen. Marco Rubio said unequivocally Wednesday that he hopes to be the lead sponsor of a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks.

“If someone else would like to do it instead of me, I’m more than happy to consider it. But I’d like to be the lead sponsor,” the Florida Republican said. “I feel very strongly about this issue. And I’d like to be the lead sponsor on it if we can find language that we can unify people behind.”

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The Weekly Standard reported three weeks ago that Rubio agreed to shepherd the bill, and Rubio attributed delays to anti-abortion senators’ attempt to identify which clause of the Constitution would allow lawmakers to implement a 20-week abortion ban nationwide.

Rubio and 27 other Republican senators signed onto a bill from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in 2011 that would require lawmakers to point to which piece of the Constitution allows government expansion — and he said adherence to that idea is causing the slowdown, not cold feet.

Rubio said “certainly” the Constitution would allow a federal law banning abortions after 20 weeks — it’s just a question of which portion of the document. Rubio is also a co-sponsor of a bill from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) that would ban abortions after 20 weeks in the District of Columbia, an issue he said that is more easily constitutionally settled given the District’s federal status.

“What we have among pro-life supporters in the Senate is a difference of opinion about: Which constitutionally enumerated power is this flowing under?” Rubio said. “We just have not yet been able to come to a consensus on that.”

Another area Rubio hasn’t fully defined is how to get a vote on the bill once it’s introduced. Aides for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have said the leader has no intention of bringing the bill up, though when pressed Reid did tell NBC’s David Gregory he’d be “happy to take a look” at the issue. The House has already passed a similar bill to the one Rubio is mulling.

Rubio said he hadn’t decided whether trying to tack the measure onto another bill as amendment was the right way to go, but slammed Reid for preemptively ruling out his bill for consideration.

“The majority leader’s opposition to this puts him outside the mainstream of the American public. They love to cite polls all the time — and well, I don’t live by polls — but polls indicate that the vast majority of Americans believe that after 20 weeks, abortion should be limited,” Rubio said.

About 61 percent of Americans support abortions within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy but support falls off a cliff past that, according to a January Gallup poll. About 64 percent of respondents said abortions during the second trimester of pregnancy should be illegal and 80 percent said abortions in the third trimester should be against the law.

“We have a vast majority of support among most Americans, irrespective of how people may feel about the issue of abortion,” Rubio said. “We’re talking about five months into a pregnancy. People certainly believe there should be significant restrictions on that.”

As evidence that his position isn’t necessarily a conservative one, Rubio also repeatedly cited restrictive abortion laws throughout much of Europe, where many countries severely restrict abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Europe “is largely viewed as a bastion of social liberalism,” Rubio said. “But even on that issue they’re more restrictive than the majority leader and his party are.”